They’d managed to knock a hole through the flimsy wood of the front door. She turned her torch on and shone it towards the door. She could see a face peering through a jagged hole in the bottom door-panel.
‘Go away!’ she screamed frantically.
The face, momentarily startled, disappeared. She heard voices outside, not whispering, just conferring quietly. Then one of them kneeled down and shouted through the hole. It was 50 Cent.
‘Come on, open the door!’
‘Please, go away!’ she whimpered. ‘We’ve got nothing in here. Nothing!’
‘Yeah right,’ he replied. ‘Don’t fuck with me. Just open up or we’ll kick it in eventually.’
She said nothing.
The voice coming through the hole tried a different tack. ‘Look, you open up, see, and share out what you got in there, and we let you go.’
She wanted to answer him, to ask if he really meant that. But she knew that he was making an empty promise.
His face appeared at the ragged hole in the front door again. She shone her torch on him and he squinted.
‘What you lookin’ like?’ he said, and then produced his torch and aimed it through the hole at her. The light lingered on her face, and then travelled down her body and then up again. ‘Oh . . . I know you. You the bitch I see up in the precinc’, innit.’ He laughed, a friendly, cheeky laugh, or at least it might have sounded friendly in another context.
‘You my honey when we get in,’ he grinned. He pushed his hand through the hole in the door, and then panned the torch he was holding around at the barricade stacked against the door. ‘You think this is going to stop us?’ he said laughing. His face disappeared from the hole and then she heard him talking quietly to the others.
They’re going to try another way in.
The lounge windows were the obvious alternative.
She raced back into the lounge from the hall, just as the first brick flew in, sending a shower of jagged shards into the room.
The first of the gang was already pulling himself cautiously in through the window-frame, when his foot found the plank on the window-sill; the plank she had hammered a row of nails into earlier this afternoon.
‘Ouch shit! Fuckin’ something, fuckin’ . . . shit!’ he yelled, pulling his leg back out.
Another of them squeezed in through the window-frame, two hands feeling cautiously for the plank. They found it, and pulled the thing out and flung it across the garden.
‘The tricky little bitch,’ she heard one of them say outside.
The window-frame was full once more with the hunched-over form of another of them trying to climb in, and this time she realised she had to swing.
The bat came down on top of his head, several nails piercing the baseball hat perched on his head, and punching through the skull beneath with a sickening crunch. The boy jerked violently, one of his hands reaching up curiously fumbling to discover what was attached to his head.
Leona yanked hard on the rounders bat to pull it lose. It came out with a grating sound, and the boy flopped back out of the window on to the ground outside.
She heard several of them gasp. ‘Fuck! Bitch killed Steve. She killed Steve.’
A second window smashed, beside the first. She waited with the bat raised, but nothing came through for a few seconds. Then she saw something large filling the second window-frame. It blocked the light coming from the torches outside. It squeezed in through the frame. She switched on her torch and saw it was the bulging form of a bed mattress being pushed through; a makeshift shield, behind which they would be waiting to surge through.
She swung her bat at it, hoping to dislodge it from the grip of those behind. The nails tore through the material exposing the white foamy stuffing inside.
‘Go away, go away!’ she screamed several times, her voice growing shrill and ragged.
‘Here we co-ome!’ someone outside called in a teasing singsong way.
Run to the hiding place. Now!
Leona had failed to pay attention to where she was standing as she’d swung ferociously at the bulging mattress. Her back was to the other open window. All of a sudden, she felt a pair of hands grab hold of her left wrist, and another hand snaked up her shoulder and tangled with her hair. She screamed in agony as the hand pulled hard, almost ripping her hair out by the roots.
Oh my God, they’ve got me!
Her head banged heavily